


The Fixed Point

by sixbeforelunch



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Ethical Dilemmas, F/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-02 12:46:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17264504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixbeforelunch/pseuds/sixbeforelunch
Summary: Cadet Ian Troi meets the woman he's going to marry.





	The Fixed Point

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beatrice_Otter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatrice_Otter/gifts).



> Thanks to evilinsanemonkey for the beta.

The Bolians were having sex again.

It wasn't that Ian begrudged them their fun, but they had been at it off and on for hours, and they weren't exactly quiet. Ian sighed and threw off the covers. It was nearly dawn anyway, and he was supposed to meet Priya and her friends for a hike on Arsia Mons in a few hours.

He almost put on his cadet's uniform out of habit, and then remembered that he was off this entire week, and dressed in civilian clothes instead. Outside, he could see a faint glow on the horizon. His hotel room boasted 'glorious views of the Martian landscape', and he supposed it delivered, except there wasn't a lot that was glorious about Mars. In his opinion, Mars was mostly just endlessly red and dirty looking.

Not that he was going to say that to Priya. She was a Martian native, and got a little defensive about her home planet. He could see Arsia Mons off in the distance. The hike should be fun, even if the view wasn't anything to write home about. He did enjoy a good caldera.

But first, coffee.

The hotel restaurant was busier than he'd expected, but he supposed he shouldn't have been surprised. Whatever the local time might be, he was in the second largest city in Mars, and the hotel was hosting people with circadian rhythms set to a hundred or more timezones, and probably some who didn't have circadian rhythms at all. He took a seat at the counter. A few moments later, a woman sat down next to him. He glanced at her. She was dressed in a colorful yellow and orange dress, and her hair was piled on top of her head in an elaborate style complete with feathers and jewels. Probably her night was ending as his day was beginning.

The waitress came and the woman said, "Nothing for me, but my friend is having coffee and a small tomato juice."

The waitress looked at Ian, and he nodded. When she was gone, he looked at his companion, taking note of her dark eyes. "Telepath? Betazoid?"

"Yes to both," she said. "And you are Ian Andrew Troi, a cadet in your senior year at Starfleet Academy."

"Do you need something from me or..." He trailed off. He didn't have a lot of experience with Betazeds, and he didn't want to do anything to offend her.

"No. Oh no." She looked shy and unsure. For some reason, and he got the impression that this was a woman who was not often either of those things. "Well...maybe just a conversation?"

His drinks came. He added a healthy splash of cream and took a long drink of coffee. "I'm meeting a friend in a little while, but we can talk, if you want."

Probably she was traveling and feeling lonely and culture shocked. From her outfit, he guessed she was coming from some fancy party. She looked a little lost, which made him think she wasn't here on her own business. A diplomat's consort, maybe? Or mother?

"Mother! Am I as old as that?"

Well, yes. "Um...no ma'am."

She sighed. "Oh, never mind. I appreciate the lie, but it's not true. I am. I know I am. I have a daughter practically old enough to be _your_ mother. I just forgot for a moment, that's all. Let's see you're twenty..."

"Twenty two Earth years, ma'am."

"Please stop calling me ma'am." She gestured to the waitress. "What's that thing you Humans make so that you can consume ethanol in the morning and have it be socially acceptable?"

"Bloody Mary?"

"No, the other one."

"Mimosa?"

"That's the one. Give me two. Make them strong."

She turned back to Ian. "Twenty two. A few years left yet then."

"Until what?"

"Until? Oh. It doesn't matter."

She looked sad. "What's your name?" he asked.

She gave him a long, appraising look. "I think it would be better for all concerned if I didn't tell you," she said. "In fact, I think I might get in quite a lot of trouble if I did that."

Was someone controlling her? He looked around, but before he could say anything she laughed. "Oh, you dear, sweet boy. I don't need protecting. It's nothing like that." She touched his hand, and then pulled away, rubbing at her fingertips where she had touched him.

The waitress set her mimosas in front of her, and the woman downed one of them in a single shot. Impressive, Ian thought, and drank his coffee.

"Ian, I want to ask you something. If there was a chance, just a chance, that you could save the life of someone you loved, but you had to break all the rules to do it, would you?"

Ian gave her a searching look, wishing that he could read her mind as easily as she read his. "I suppose that depends on what rules would need breaking, and how slim the chance was."

"Some pretty important rules," she said. "And the odds are...they defy analysis. Butterfly effect, I think they call it."

"Hmm." He laughed softly. "You aren't a time traveler, are you?"

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, and the smile fell right off of his face. "No, please, don't tell me. The last thing I need is to get pulled into a temporal incident." He took drank the last of his coffee and asked for a refill. He needed it.

"The thing about time travel--" Ian paused. He really hoped this wasn't some weird test by the Office of Temporal Investigations. " _Hypothetically speaking_ the thing about time travel, is that you need to decide if you're operating on a fixed point or a variable point morality."

"I'm afraid I don't have much experience with time travel, and I never did go to Starfleet Academy."

"Fixed point morality means you make all decisions based on the ramifications at a single point in time, most commonly the point of departure. Variable point, you make your choices based on situation at whatever point in time you happen to be in, irrespective of the potential consequences for your own personal timeline."

She leaned forward and rested her chin in her hand. She was pretty, he thought. Older, much older, than he usually would have noticed, but he liked the curve of her lips and the brightness of her eyes. He blushed, realizing she could read those thoughts, and she laughed. "Oh, darling. Don't be embarrassed. That means more to me than you can possibly imagine." She tapped the counter with one finger. "But as for question of morality...well, isn't that just an extension of what we're always doing. You have to balance what you want in the moment with the ramifications for the future. With time travel it just gets more complicated."

"A lot more complicated," Ian said. "You're working in more dimensions, not just present and future, but past, present, and future. And with more information. If you kill an innocent person because you think maybe they'll commit genocide one day, you'd be considered insane. If you come from the future and kill someone who is already guilty from your frame of reference even though they were innocent relative to the time period in which they died...whatever the ethics of the choice, there's sound logic there." He cleared his throat. "Hypothetically. If you were traveling in time."

"Which I'm not, because if I were, you would have to report it."

"Exactly." He smiled. He had no idea if she really was a time traveler or not. Probably she wasn't. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, people who claimed to be time travelers were either crazy or scam artists or both. But maybe she was. Who knew? Maybe she really was trying to work her way through the morality of time travel with a Starfleet cadet in a hotel restaurant on Mars. The universe was a strange place. James Kirk had kidnapped whales in the 20th century and brought them forward in time. Compared to that, this was practically mundane.

"So where do you fall? Fixed point or variable point morals?"

"Well, like most ethical choices, I don't believe there's one rule to be applied in every situation. Starfleet policy is to maintain the status quo at the fixed point of departure, which means staying out of history's way, even if it means making some unsavory choices."

"Too many variables," the woman said. "Saving one life might end up costing thousands."

"Exactly. You aren't a god. Don't play one."

"But isn't that what we do every day with every choice? Set off chains of causality the long-term consequences of which we can never know?"

"Well...yeah. But we're flying blind in the present. Fixed-point morality posits that your knowledge changes things. And, I won't lie, there's an element of selfishness in it. Most people who travel in time want to go home sooner or later. Someone who intended to live in the past would have much less interest in maintaining the status quo of the future, but the people in that future probably aren't going to want to be wiped from existence." He shook his head. "It's complicated."

"It certainly is," she said. "Even if I break all the rules to save my--to save the people I lost, to try to save them, I might go home only to find that my son never existed. That my planet is in ruins. Or something equally terrible."

Ian swallowed, suddenly certain that this woman was neither crazy nor a scam artist. "Yes. Exactly."

She nodded slowly. She reached out and cupped his cheek in one hand. "You are so intelligent," she said. "And so thoughtful." She leaned forward and kissed him, first on the cheek, and then on the lips. His body _reacted_. Not just in the usual way, but in every way. His toes curled in his boots, and he felt hot all over. His breath caught. His brain was on fire. It was like he was seeing into the essence of her, and she was bright and she was beautiful and she was chaotic and she was smart and she was--

He gasped as she pulled away. "You're amazing."

"Yes, I am," she said. She looked past him at the door. "And I think I'm about to go home."

He started to turn to look, but she turned him back to her. "Listen to me. In a few years, you are going to meet a girl. She is going to be frequently stupid, and overbearing, and loud, and obnoxious, and tiresome. You probably shouldn't put up with her, but you will, and she will be forever grateful to you for that. No matter what, never, ever doubt that that that girl loves you. She loves you passionately and madly and like she will never love anyone ever again. Do you understand me?"

"I think--I--yes."

A heavy step next to them made him look up. There was a captain standing there, tall and bearded and wearing a uniform that looked like it had just come off of the fabricator. He sprang to his feet, habit overcoming the knowledge that he technically didn't have to since he was off duty. 

The captain glanced at Ian, and then did a double-take, his eyes narrowing. Ian started to get nervous. If the captain was OTI...if this really was some sort of temporal incident...he had finals coming up! He just wanted to finish the Academy and go study planet formation!

The captain looked at the woman. "Mrs--Ambassador, we should go."

The woman rolled her eyes. "I am not stupid, William. Cadet Troi and I have just been having a quiet conversation about fixed-point morality, and status quo at the point of departure."

Ian could see the muscle jump in the other man's jaw, and wondered at all of the things he wasn't saying.

"And you may be my son-in-law, but you can't just think things like that about me. Honestly!" She winked at Ian, and he had the strangest sensation that he was watching her put her mask back on.

"Ambassador..."

"Yes, yes. I'm coming." She put her hand on Ian's shoulder. "Goodbye, darling. Remember what I said."

Before he could speak, she was gone, trailing the other man out of the restaurant, and he was left with nothing but the taste of her on his lips, and the absolute certainty that he would see her again.

Ian smiled. He couldn't wait to meet that girl.

end


End file.
